New & Noteworthy

If the prince ignored Cinderella, he would not have a happily ever after. Nor might we if we ignore Pol III. (strwalker)

This is, of course, a mistake. The best person by far is Cinderella and she should not be ignored because of her position in life.

The RNA polymerases in a eukaryotic cell are similar except that one is the star and two are the scullery maids. RNA polymerase II (Pol II), the reader of protein encoding genes, gets most of the attention. Pol I and Pol III, the enzymes that make RNAs that aren’t usually translated into proteins, are mostly relegated to supporting roles.

In a study in Nature, Filer and coworkers show that ignoring Pol III can be as big a mistake as ignoring Cinderella. If you want to live a longer life that is.

Just as there were hints of Cinderella’s specialness, so too there were hints that perhaps Pol III plays an important role in longevity. That hint goes by the name of TORC1.

Previous work had shown that inhibiting TORC1 can increase the lifespan of beasts ranging from yeast to mice. Given that TORC1 is a strong activator of Pol III, Filer and coworkers set out to determine if inhibiting Pol III could do the same thing.

As any good researcher should, they started out by looking in our favorite model organism, the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

Pol III is pretty complicated—it is made up of 17 different subunits encoded by 17 different essential genes. These authors went after the largest subunit, C160, encoded by the RPO31 (RPC160) gene.

This means that there should be less Pol III in a cell when IAA is around. Western blot analysis confirmed that this was indeed the case.

The authors found that yeast with less Pol III had a longer chronological lifespan. In other words, each yeast cell survived longer. Having less Pol III did not significantly increase replicative lifespan though; they did not bud more often over their lifetime.

These authors did not get as significant a result when they targeted the largest subunit of Pol II, RPO21 (RPB220). The strain appeared to do better in the presence of IAA compared to the control strain, suggesting that targeting Pol II had a small effect on longevity; but it was nothing like was seen with Pol III.

They next turned to a couple of model organisms with more cells—nematodes, also known as C. elegans, and fruit flies, or Drosophila.

When Filer and coworkers used RNA interference (RNAi) to knock down the amount of the largest subunit of Pol III, rpc-1, in C. elegans, the worm lived longer. And when they generated a strain of Drosophila which had only one working copy of dC53 (CG5147), a gene that encodes a Pol III subunit, these fruit flies lived longer too. Lowering the amount of Pol III is a good thing if you want to live longer!

Sauron would still be alive if he didn’t ignore those hobbits. We might live longer too if we stop ignoring Pol III! (Colony of Gamers)

Previous work had shown that the gut often controls longevity in C. elegans. These authors showed that the same holds true for Pol III reduction. Targeting just the Pol III in the gut was sufficient to give this little worm a longer life.

The same turned out to be true in the fruit fly. Using RNAi against two different Pol III subunits in the Drosophila gut was enough to have extend these flies’ lives. Targeting Pol III in the fat body did not have the same effect, and targeting Pol III in neuronal cells extended life only a little.

So reducing Pol III in the gut is good enough for flies and worms to live longer. In fact, reducing Pol III activity had as much effect on longevity as does inhibiting TORC1. Scientists ignore this hidden gem at their own risk!

Since Pol III is ignored, but dangerous for lifespan, perhaps a better analogy than Cinderella might be Sauron and the hobbits of the Shire from the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Sauron ignores the hobbits who hold the key (or the ring) to Sauron’s shortened lifespan.

If Sauron had paid attention, he’d still be lording it over Middle Earth at the end of the third book. Just as we might live longer if we start paying more attention to that hidden danger—excessive Pol III activity, possibly in the gut.

Cancer often gets going with chromosome instability. Basically a cell gets a mutation that causes its chromosomes to mutate at a higher rate. Now it and any cells that come from it build mutations faster and faster until they hit on the right combination to make the cell cancerous. An accelerating avalanche of mutations has led to cancer.

A mutation causing chromosomal instability can start an avalanche that leads to cancer.

There are plenty of obvious candidates for the genes that start these avalanches: genes like those involved in segregating chromosomes and repairing DNA, for example. But there are undoubtedly sleeper genes that no one has really thought of. In a new study out in GENETICS, Minaker and coworkers have used the yeast S. cerevisiae to identify three of these genes — GPN1 (previously named NPA3), GPN2, and GPN3.

A mutation in any one of these genes leads to chromosomal problems. For example, mutations in GPN1 and GPN2 cause defects in sister chromatid cohesion and mutations in GPN3 confer a visible chromosome transmission defect. All of the mutants also show increased sensitivity to hydroxyurea and ultraviolet light, two potent mutagens. And if two of the genes are mutated at once, these defects become more severe. Clearly, mutating GPN1, GPN2, and/or GPN3 leads to an increased risk for even more mutations!

What makes this surprising is what these genes actually do in a cell. They are responsible for getting RNA polymerase II (RNAPII) and RNA polymerase III (RNAPIII) into the nucleus and assembled properly. This was known before for GPN1, but here the authors show that in gpn2 and gpn3 mutants, RNAPII and RNAPIII subunits also fail to get into the nucleus. Genetic and physical interactions between all three GPN proteins suggest that they work together in overlapping ways to get enough RNAPII and RNAPIII chugging away in the nucleus.

So it looks like having too little RNAPII and RNAPIII in the nucleus causes chromosome instability. This is consistent with previous work that shows that mutations in many of the RNAPII subunits have similar effects. Still, these genes would not be the first ones most scientists would look at when trying to find causes of chromosomal instability. Score another point for unbiased screens in yeast leading to a better understanding of human disease.